Have you been seeing the 30 Day Plank Challenge around the internet? About a month ago, I decided to give it a try. I thought “How hard could it be? All you do is hold yourself above the ground for a while.” Wrong. It was pretty hard, but I did it! The first week wasn’t too bad. You start at 20 seconds daily and work your way up to 40 seconds. By the end of 30 days, you are able to hold the pose for 5 minutes! I used the free Plank A Lot app on my phone to keep track of the days. Drew ended up doing it with me each night. To keep our minds distracted, we listened to NPR while holding the pose. Newt caught on to this quickly. After a few nights, he would get excited and start frantically wagging his tail when he saw us lay on the ground. He would then proceed to enjoy himself by laying down between us and happily wagging his tail while we suffered in pain. The worst was when he decided that it would be fun to lick our faces or the bottoms of our feet while we were defenseless. We ended up taking longer than 30 days to complete the challenge, but I still feel quite accomplished! 5 minutes was brutal, but not nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be. My core has been strengthened. Success! My mother completed the challenge as well, go mom! Since the last NPR story we listened to was about how to construct the perfect ice cream sandwich, I decided the best way to celebrate the completion of the challenge would be to make my own ice cream. I whipped up some chocolate peanut butter ice cream with chocolate covered peanuts.

The recipe came from the Perfect Scoop by David Lebovitz. Every recipe I have tried has been fantastic. This includes the parsley ice cream and mango sorbet pictured below.

I was too impatient and didn’t let the base cool long enough (or really at all) before pouring it into the ice cream bowl. The end result looked a little like poo, but it tasted fine. A few hours in the freezer resulted in a much nicer texture.